Why Isn't My Website Getting Sales? #5 Product Descriptions

All of the words on your website - known as copy - are important to your website. They deserve at least as much attention as the design of your website because they represent your chance to directly address potential customers. In that regard, your website copy is equivalent to the words you would offer in person if a customer wandered into your shop.

Nowhere is this more important than in your product descriptions. It is at this point that your website copy can directly influence people to add the product to their basket (or, as might be the case if you’re not getting sales, fail to achieve this or even dissuade people from buying).

Here’s how to write products descriptions that sell your product.

Focus on benefits

Your product descriptions should always focus on the benefits of the product. Put benefits ahead of information, personality and anything else you might consider to be worthwhile. The reason that your target customer needs the product in their life should be front and centre.

Paint a picture

Within the context of presenting the benefits of your product, try to help your target customer to visualise themselves using the product. That might involve describing a scenario in which they would be using the product or at least placing it into a suitable context for them.

Use ‘you’

A nice device to help paint that picture is by deploying the second person pronoun. By using ‘you’ in your product description, you can immediately transport the reader to a universe in which they have bought and are using your product.

Avoid blah and hyperbole

Many product descriptions fail because they land in one of those two categories. By blah we mean empty waffle that lacks personality or anything that’s tailored to the product. You will have read plenty of these. They might go something like: “This excellent product is certain to be a great addition…” It could be trying to sell almost anything, but is unlikely to succeed.

Hyperbolic product descriptions exaggerate and over-egg a product to the extent that they immediately call into question the seller’s integrity. Is the product really ‘unique’ or could the reader get something almost identical from another retailer? Create a banned words list when you come across similar examples of hyperbole to make sure you don’t fall into the same trap. Shopify suggests in this great post never using a superlative unless you can support it with hard evidence.

Tone of voice

As we mentioned, your website copy is equivalent to addressing a shopper in a bricks-and-mortar store, so it is important that your brand’s personality shines through in your product descriptions. A consistent and confident tone of voice will help to you convey your brand values to the very people you need to buy into those values.

SEO

Good products descriptions have SEO benefits for your business. There are two main aspects to this. Firstly, by incorporating keywords relevant to the product you will make it more likely that people will find your product when searching for related terms. That said, stuffing your description with lots of keywords is likely to have the opposite effect. The SEO experts at MOZ discuss this in their blog post on product descriptions.

Secondly, Google and other search engines value unique content. By writing something that is individual to your website (rather than copying and pasting something sent to you by a supplier), you are giving your product page the best possible chance of ranking well in search engines.

Testing

Remember we discussed A/B testing earlier in this blog series? There is nothing to stop you testing different versions of a product description to see which one best converts traffic into sales.